Meanwhile
by KyrieofAccender
Summary: The Stone Rose fic. The Doctor is in the Renaissance with Michelangelo, learning to sculpt and making one statue in particular. But, meanwhile...


Hallo all! It's Kyrie again, back from a looooong fanfic break! Since last I've posted anything, I've become a rather rabid Doctor Who fan. Hence this fic and then next oneshot I'll be posting as well.

This is not based on a specific episode, but on an audiobook that I bought called The Stone Rose. It takes place between New Earth and School Reunion in season 2 (rather a large gap there, but hey...) and it is amazing.

I listen to The Stone Rose WAAAAAY too much (mostly because it's David Tennant reading it and he has a very nice voice to fall asleep to) and so I got to thinking... basically, the gist of the story, without giving too much away, is that the Doctor and Rose find a statue of Rose in the British Museum and go back to 2nd century Rome. The problem with this is that the actual Rose gets turned into stone! The Doctor fears that she is the one in the museum, but in fact the one in the museum was made by him; the Doctor went back to the Renaissance, got some lessons from Michelangelo, made the Rose statue, and put it in 2nd century Rome.

But, says me who thinks way too much, there was a gap between when Rose became a statue and when the Doctor woke her up, so to speak. Technically, she was only a statue for a few hours, but in the "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff," I'm guessing there was a version of reality in which Rose stayed a statue for a long time, while the Doctor was puttering around in the Renaissance.

I know. Thinking about time too much makes my head hurt.

Right. I shall stop with this very long, tedious author's note... Allons-y!

* * *

_Meanwhile…_

The Doctor was in the Renaissance. Italy, to be precise.

To be more precise, he was in Rome, attempting to persuade Michelangelo to take on a completely unexpected, completely inexperienced new student.

Then, once that had all been arranged, the Doctor was presented with the painstaking task of persuading the famed sculptor that using such futuristic tools as Rose's cell phone – to which Mickey had texted photos of the statue in the museum – and his sonic screwdriver were _not_, in fact, cheating.

Michelangelo wasn't happy about it, but he relented, eventually, much to the Doctor's relief. His new teacher might have been a perfectionist of the highest degree, but in this case, the Doctor was an even worse one. The statue had to be _perfect_. It _had _to be exactly like the one in the museum, excepting only the chips, cracks, and missing arm it would suffer later in its several thousand year existence. He was certain that if he didn't get it exactly right, some sort of horrible paradox would cause the universe to explode. But he was used to that kind of situation, after all. No pressure.

And so the long days of Michelangelo's tutelage began, and the Doctor's statue slowly began to emerge from the block of marble as the image of his dear, dear friend.

_Meanwhile_…

In a different Rome – well, not so much a _different _Rome, as the same Rome quite a few centuries earlier – a few scant miles outside that ancient city, was a wood.

It was a perfectly ordinary wood, not very big, with lots of green trees and bushes. There was a little clearing at the center, which looked rather man-made. A shrine of some sort, perhaps. At the center of this gap in the trees stood the thing that made it look like a shrine – a statue of the goddess Minerva, about five and a half feet tall, complete with noble stance, war helmet, and spear. She stood alone in the clearing, visited only occasionally by the odd passerby.

Of course, the statue had not always been called Minerva. Before she had been a statue, she had been a person, a flesh-and-blood human being, by the name of Rose Tyler. But she was a statue now. She couldn't remember that she had once been Rose; a statue's head is solid stone, and has nothing to remember with. It was a pity, because Rose had had adventures beyond the imagination of most people living on Earth, past, present, or future. And she had a friend, someone she loved, who had literally given her the universe in a blue box that was bigger on the inside.

But all that was forgotten now. Not even forgotten, really; just… gone. Gone completely. Rose – or, at any rate, the statue that had once been Rose – just stood there. Not even waiting; a statue cannot anticipate anything. She simply stood, in rain, wind, or sun. Birds perched on her head, and she did nothing to stop them. She did not mind. There was no reaction when her bizarre, brawny "creator" would come to worship his goddess, would stroke her cheek lovingly with his strange, thick-fingered hands.

Rose would have hated that. She had, before he had made her a statue. But now she was a statue, she didn't mind. There was nothing she could do about it.

For time immeasurable she simply stood there, blank, nothing but a carven hunk of stone. How long was it? An hour? A day? A week? A month? A year, even, perhaps? How could she know? Her stone eyes saw nothing; her stone ears heard nothing; her stone mind remembered nothing. For all intents and purposes, she _was _nothing.

And so she stood.

Waiting without waiting.

Birds sat. The man came and went, and came and went again. Dogs sniffed around her pedestal. The wind blew.

Meanwhile, she stood there, oblivious to everything. No cry for help, no struggle against her stone prison. Before, she would have known he would come for her. He had done so before; they had saved each other often enough. Rose would have believed with every fibre of her being that the Doctor would find her and save her.

But there was no fibre of Rose's being left.

Everything that Rose was had been turned to stone.

And so she sat, and stared blankly ahead, and waited.

Time passed. How long, she couldn't say.

And then, somewhere far in the statue's past, only a few hours after the statue had become a statue, Rose blinked, woke up, fell forward into the arms of her Doctor…

But, meanwhile…

* * *

Thanks very much for reading! I do hope you've enjoyed my first little foray into Doctor Who fanfics... constructive criticism, and all other comments, are very much welcome (ie review, pretty please? :D). ~Kyrie


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